Diana Berulytė is the co-founder of , a luxury home goods brand that started as a side business. At the end of 2018, Diana was on maternity leave thinking about the day she would have to go back to work when she and her husband made the decision that would change her lives. “We launched our first online store in 2019 and we grew little by little. Now we have several warehouses in Vilnius and I never went back to my old job.”
Like all good business ideas, Softy started small and set out to provide the answer to a simple problem: finding high-quality towels that stay soft even after multiple washes. For Diana, it was a decision based on everyday life.
“I just wanted to buy some nice soft towels. I went to stores like Senukai and Ikea and the quality was just ridiculous. I visited some online stores and understood that apart from the material and color, the sellers really didn’t know what they were selling.” So, with the end of maternity leave nearing her, she and her husband decided to start out on their own with an idea in mind. “Well, let’s do it, let’s try to sell good towels”, they said, and that’s how Softy was born.
Offer and demand
Having identified a niche, the couple invited Diana’s mother-in-law, who had worked as a product technologist for most of her life. They focused on the core of the problem: supply. “My mother-in-law and my husband practically lived in Poland for about a month.” Valuable time wisely spent, the two set out to visit as many manufacturers, importers and suppliers as possible.
“This is how we bought our first products during that month.” They opened a small shop in Druskininkai, a picturesque spa town in southern Lithuania, an appropriate location for a traditional family store selling handcrafted fabrics. Soon, Softy fixed his gaze on something larger.
Diana’s mother-in-law spent her time managing the Druskininkai store and customer requests, while the couple spent the next six months searching for the best fabric suppliers around the world. “At the time, I knew a little about fabric, so I tried to talk to people in the industry that I hoped to work with. I started asking questions and found out that many companies couldn’t even tell the weaving methods and materials apart.”
In that moment, Diana knew for a fact that Softy had something different. “We really know what we sell, where the materials come from, how the threads and fabrics are made and dyed, what type of sewing should be applied to the different products, among others. We understand what makes certain fabrics good or bad, and what could happen if you choose the wrong supplier.”
Diana spoke with suppliers from Pakistan to Portugal to make sure she could meet her customers’ demands and find the inventory to grow Softy with her first online store.
growing to success
As the online store grew steadily, Diana and her husband were looking for agile solutions to take Softy to the next level. “We always try to play it safe with marketing. We tried not to upset our customers, but it was just because we didn’t understand the process.”
It would take more than two years of slow and steady business before the big change came. The family contacted an outside marketing agency in November 2021, hoping to really level up. “First, they said we don’t spend enough on marketing.” There are no surprises there. “They said we should at least triple our marketing budget and it worked.”
Softy was Diana, her husband and mother-in-law, a family business of three who made a modest living. After consulting with outside experts, his operations grew exponentially. “We went from a turnover of around €1,000 per month to €300,000 per year”.
Still, the division of labor remains the same as ever: Diana runs the online store and oversees the supply chain, her mother-in-law runs the store in Druskininkai and manages customer relations, and her husband handles all marketing decisions.
Analytical and agile solutions have proven to be at the core of Softy’s success. “Every day we review our ad analytics. Google Ads and Facebook Ads are our main channels and we modify them throughout the day until we see traffic patterns that we are satisfied with. We use them to plan our next day.”
Once Diana and her husband were able to see how fast their business was growing, it became clear that they would have to upgrade their web hosting to keep up with the demand.
hosting for the future
Softy’s rapid growth as a business meant that the online store and hosting providers were always in a state of flux. “We continue to outperform the capabilities of other providers. Our store did not stop failing in the hours with more demand; They couldn’t keep up with us.”
“We were really annoyed that the website was slow, even after several optimization attempts. Not to mention the endless hassles when you’re in a hurry to ship Christmas orders to get them on time and the online store goes down for 5-30 minutes several times a day.” Diana felt that Softy was losing customers as a direct result of poor quality hosting: “So we migrated the website to and everything changed immediately.”
Switching to was a transformative move for Softy, who is currently in the process of transferring the other sites. “We plan to move our Latvian, Estonian and English websites to as well because it has definitely made our site faster and our customers happier.”
Looking back on Softy’s growth, Diana is convinced that she was creating the first online store that changed everything. “You can’t just create a basic website. You have to work at it to keep your customers happy. For three years, we have rebuilt our online store from scratch several times. To maximize the user experience, we’ve added express checkouts, set up product display plugins, changed our checkout page structure, and more. Now, we are preparing the version .co.uk Softy to launch it in a new market. That our products can be found on eBay and Amazon is the next step”.
“We knew we were ready to expand, and we knew that would not let us down, that our online store would not crash, and that we could continue to grow.”
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Luis is an eCommerce and website builder professional who loves digital marketing. He is dedicated to helping companies improve their online presence through marketing practices. When he is not sitting in front of the computer, he is surely cooking a meal or training.
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